Comparative Condition Monitoring and Tribology of Spherical Bearings

This exciting, industrially focussed PhD project will pursue areas of development based on initial work conducted by Cardiff School of Engineering with an industrial partner (SKF Aerospace) looking at spherical bearings which feature a composite fabric wear liner. The aim of this PhD project is to develop techniques and technologies for detecting failure in bearings installed on rotorcraft. Previous work has:

1) Developed a testing facility which allows the comparative / simultaneous testing of four liner samples under reciprocating conditions.

2) Produced data sets containing temperature, wear and acoustic emission (AE) data for the failure of liner samples using current liner materials.

3) Developed various analysis techniques including correlation measures, spectral analysis, statistical process control based techniques, in order to compare a population of samples under test and identify when a sample is wearing more rapidly than the others in the population.

The work has shown much promise in the proposed methods, but has also identified many areas of further work required before the technology reaches maturity and is suitable for deployment on a helicopter. These include:

• Development of a more substantial test dataset.
• Validation of current methods, including bearing tests
• New analysis techniques, including further investigation of AE techniques
• Benchmarking of various monitoring / sensing technologies and energy harvesting potential
• Prognostics Capability
• New Liner Materials

The proposed PhD study will use experimental methods combined with data analysis to develop detailed insights in the above areas. The student will work closely with the industrial partner and will spend periods of time working at SKF to conduct some of the experimental work.

Candidates should hold or expect to gain a first class degree or a good 2.1 and/or an appropriate Master’s level qualification (or their equivalent).

Applicants whose first language is not English will be required to demonstrate proficiency in the English language (IELTS 6.5 or equivalent)

Start date: July 2017